U.S. Pat. No. 6,271,560, which is incorporated herein by reference, teaches the use of a floating gate avalanche PMOS (FAMOS) device structure programmable with CMOS compatible voltages as a non-volatile storage element. The floating gate PMOS is placed in series with an NMOS transistor which serves as a write enable switch.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,157,574, which is incorporated herein by reference, teaches the use of the FAMOS device structure programmable with CMOS compatible voltages in a multiple time programmable (MTP) mode by adding a floating gate poly-poly coupling capacitor to enable the erase operation. An erase operation is carried out by application of a negative voltage pulse to the poly-2 plate of the coupling capacitor. Alternatively, an erase operation can be accomplished by application of the high positive voltage to the n-well housing the floating gate device.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,137,723, which is incorporated herein by reference, teaches the use a gate oxide to p-well coupling capacitor for an erase operation. This approach requires an additional isolating well (3rd well) to isolate the negative cell erase voltage (applied to the p-well) from the substrate (which is typically p-type in CMOS technologies). Alternatively, an erase operation can be accomplished by application of the high positive voltage to the n-well housing the floating gate device. Application of high positive erase voltage to the n-well containing the FAMOS device in series with the access transistor is limited to voltages that are lower than the junction breakdown of the P+N diode or the gate oxide breakdown (PMOS access device) or the series combination of the P+N and N+P diodes (NMOS access device). This limits the applicability of existing cells for the MTP use to relatively thin (less than 10 mm, 3.3V I/O devices) gate oxides requiring less than ˜12V erase voltage.
Since many CMOS technologies use and will continue to use 5V I/O devices with gate dielectric thickness in the 10-15 nm range (which would require erase voltages of ˜12V to ˜18V), there is a clear need for a MTP device that is capable of withstanding high positive erase voltages.